Contents

Experimental days

"I did most of the experiments. Of course, I sometimes felt bored because experiments often didn't work well due to unexpected reasons.But overall it was very fresh and fantastic experience for me."

Shingo

"You are happy. Whenever I conducted experiments, they didn't work well :<"

Shun

"That must be a coincidence."

Shingo

"Thanks. It was very nice experience any way! "

Hayato

"Why are uploaded pictures of mine always experimental scene :( ? "

Yuito

"Although you don't like experiments:D "

Hayato

"That's not the case!"

Domestic meeting

All the Japanese teams gathered at the University of Tokyo and had a domestic competition.
Fortunately our project got high score and ranked second among seven teams.
After the competition, we had a dinner party with all the other students.
It was fun and it was a good opportunity to interact with other teams' members.
We're looking forward to meeting them again at Harvard University!

Interacting with laboratory members

It was September 27th, when the other members were absent. I was invited to lunch, and had a lunch with laboratory members.
It was quite interesting because though I was in Tokyo, I was the only Japanese, and the other five members were all French!
They spoke in French and sometimes in English and rarely in Japanese.
I enjoyed the situation a lot.
(Shun Otsubo)

Dramatic success

It was truly a wonderful day because I got a clear picture of the modified origami for the first time.
At this section, I want to introduce you this event which really moved me and a secret story behind the success.

We rarely succeeded observing DNA origami in those days and it was the last day of our summer vacation.
There were no samples on Fuji lab's desk, where samples of modified origami were supposed to be.
Actually they were trashed after annealing.
We found them in a trash box and sighed deeply.
Obviously, it was the worst start ever, but we have nothing to do other than observing the samples that day, so we decided to observe them.
We have three samples that day.
One was the modified origami, and the other two were the samples for control experiments.
I did control experiments first, but failed.
Mr. Matsubara said to me, "I have an appointment this evening, so please finish your experiments in thirty minutes."
This means that I could do experiments only once and actually this was the last experiment of the summer vacation.
I set samples in AFM and gazed at the screen.
Unbelievabably, clear picture was displayed on the screen.
I hurried to put cover strands to the modified origami, and observed again.
Then I got a wonderful picture I haven't ever seen before, a picture of DNA origami with three lines!
I got really exited and moved.

Don't you think this is exactly a good example of "Failure is the mother of invention"?
Thanks to this experiment, we found that it is best for DNA origami to be left under room temperature.
Actually, this invention is the key of our success on DNA tablet.

Lodging together

We lodged at Hayato's house several times to do our work.
In this picture, we are barbecuing.
That was fun a lot.
Well, we have to insist on this: we gathered to work, not to play.

The Last Hope

Two days before the deadline of this wiki page, we were at Mr.Matsubara's lab to do AFM experiments.
We had tried to observe the pictures on the DNA tablet, but we hadn't succeeded at all until then.
That day, we had some samples of tablet solution named "Last Hope", which we remade the day before. That was the last chance for us to get some good pictures to upload on the wiki page.

It was over eight o'clock PM, Shun and Hayato were manipulating the AFM, but they were very tired. Mr.Matsubara, the supervisor, was falling asleep. Shingo was almost dead. We were all exhausted.

"But we still can and must try."

We continued observing, and finally got some pictures.
But they were not clear. The mood got more negative.
However, it was sure that they were different from plain origamis.
There seemed to be something on the tablet's surface.

"Look! This is 'I love DNA'!!"

"And this is Tablet Boy !!"

Although the pictures are not so clear, we surely got a good result. There WERE "I love DNA" and some shapes of Tablet Boy.